arging it for a smaller man--no doubt with the feeling
that Tammas alone could look like a Christian in it. Like the whole
congregation, of course, he had to stand during the prayers--the first
of which averaged half an hour in length. If he stood erect his head
and shoulders vanished beneath funereal trappings, when he seemed
decapitated, and if he stretched his neck the pulpit tottered. He
looked like the pillar on which it rested, or he balanced it on his
head like a baker's tray. Sometimes he leaned forward as reverently as
he could, and then, with his long lean arms dangling over the side of
his box, he might have been a suit of "blacks" hung up to dry. Once I
was talking with Cree Queery in a sober, respectable manner, when all
at once a light broke out on his face. I asked him what he was
laughing at, and he said it was at Lang Tammas. He got grave again
when I asked him what there was in Lang Tammas to smile at, and
admitted that he could not tell me. However, I have always been of
opinion that the thought of the precentor in his box gave Cree a
fleeting sense of humour.

Tammas and Hendry Munn were the two paid officials of the church,
Hendry being kirk-officer; but poverty was among the few points they
had in common. The precentor was a cobbler, though he never knew it,
shoemaker being the name in those parts, and his dwelling-room was also
his workshop. There he sat in his "brot," or apron, from early morning
to far on to midnight, and contrived to make his six or eight shillings
a week. I have often sat with him in the darkness that his "cruizey"
lamp could not pierce, while his mutterings to himself of "ay, ay, yes,
umpha, oh ay, ay man," came as regularly and monotonously as the tick
of his "wag-at-the-wa'" clock. Hendry and he were paid no fixed sum
for their services in the Auld Licht kirk, but once a year there was a
collection for each of them, and so they jogged along. Though not the
only kirk-officer of my time Hendry made the most lasting impression.
He was, I think, the only man in Thrums who did not quake when the
minister looked at him. A wild story, never authenticated, says that
Hendry once offered Mr. Dishart a snuff from his mull. In the streets
Lang Tammas was more stern and dreaded by evildoers, but Hendry had
first place in the kirk. One of his duties was to precede the minister
from the session-house to the pulpit and open the door for him. Having
shut Mr. Dishart in he s